How to Write SEO Friendly Blog Posts – A Step-by-Step Guide

Your blog has been great for getting quality visitors on your site. But it’s time to increase visibility for your posts. So now the question is: How to Write SEO friendly Blog Posts?

I like to make my blog posts SEO friendly using a top-down approach. You can think of it like a pyramid.

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How to Write SEO Friendly Blog Posts – The Pyramid Approach

I use a pyramid to segment the most important SEO elements for optimizing.

Think of the top of the pyramid as the most important factors for making SEO friendly blog posts. As we work our way down, elements get less and less important.

Pro Tip: Because some SEO elements are more important than others, doesn’t mean you should ignore them. A pyramid isn’t complete without its entire structure. Same with your SEO friendly posts.

Now that we have a metaphor to work with, let’s break down the step-by-step.

Page Title – The Essence of your Blog

At the top of the pyramid, you have your page title. Because the page title is the most important SEO element, it piques the pyramid for writing SEO friendly blog posts.

Page Title Best Practices:

• Mention your target keyword early in the page title.
• Use emotion grabbing keywords – e.g. awesome, simple, easy.
• Keep under 60 characters to avoid truncation

Description – Describing Blog Features

Next, to your page title, your page description also plays a role in writing SEO friendly blogs.

Your page description should sum up all the goodness packed into your post. From an SEO perspective, think of it as an ad line.

Page Description Best Practices:

• Mention target keyword early in your page description.
• Specify who the content is for – e.g. Project Manager, Technical Recruiter, Marketing Manager
• Mention attractive features in your blog.
• Keep under 140 characters to avoid truncation.

URL – Where Visitors are Heading

Now that you’ve covered your page title and description, customize your URL. URL may not seem like a big deal, but there is a cognitive effect associated with your link.

URL Best practices:

• Keep your URL simple and clean.
• Use the specific keyword or keyphrase your blog is targeting.

Page title, description, and URL are what I consider the top of the pyramid. These three elements are important to write SEO friendly blog posts. They aren’t seen directly on the blog page where the visitor is reading.

But here’s where you do see them:

Main Headers – The Blog Title

Now we’re getting into the blog itself. Your header is the main title of your blog. These are you <h1></h1>tags.

There’s no character limit here, but I try to keep my main headers similar to the page title. Because your goal is for traffic to click through from search engines, this a good consistency practice.

Main Header Best Practices:

• Mention your target keyword.
• Use one header per blog
• Make the main header visible on the page.

Sub-headers – Leaving a Topic Footprint

Your sub-headers break up your content and give you an opportunity to add SEO juice to your blog post. While we’re getting into the nitty-gritty of writing SEO friendly blog posts, these elements are still important.

Sub-header Best Practices:

• Try to mention your target keyword at least twice in your sub-headers.
• Try using other keyword or keyphrase variations in your sub-headers.
• Don’t force your keywords into sub-headers where is doesn’t make sense.

Body Text – Sprinkling Keywords Where You Can

We’re now into the meat of your blog post. Here your goal should be to mention target keywords when possible. But be careful not to overstep keyword sprinkling. Remember your blogs are for human eyes – not search engines.

Body Text Best Practices: 

• Sprinkle keywords naturally.
• Use Latent Semantic Keywords (variations of your keyword).
• Aim for about 1% keyword density.

Images – Making Use of Text Descriptions

You may be thinking:

Images play a role in SEO too? Yes, they do. And to help boost your SEO scores higher, mention target keywords in all blog images. You can do this by making use of Alt

You can do this by making use of Alt img tag. And for WordPress users, by filling in the Alt text field here:

Alt img Best Practices: 

• Mention target keyword in all images.

How to Write SEO Friendly Blog Posts

There you have it. You now have the basic building blocks for optimizing blog posts. Are there any other tips you would add on how to write SEO friendly blog posts? Questions? Let us know in the comments below.